I have been helping friends get into bitcoin and hell I just wrote a guide. This is an Australian guide and updated as of December 2017

Sign up to both btcmarkets.net (Aussie exchange) and www.bittrex.com (largest exchange) These two will cover cheap bitcoin in AUD and alternative coins

Immediately start verification process for both and connect bank account for BTCMarkets. The verification process can take 1-2 weeks

Securing account

Go to BTCMarkets and enable 2FA – 2 factor authentication.

Download Google authenticator on phone

When you see the QR code DON’T SCAN IT! PRINT OUT A COPY FIRST. In fact, print two copies. One for you and one for someone you trust. Do not take photos of this code. Hide this paper somewhere safe in case you lose your phone.

20% buy ETH/AUD (ETH is the ‘operating system’ for a lot of other coins) at Best sell price

Best time to buy is right now, but better when the news isn’t talking about all time highs. You now own some crypto!

Transfer Bitcoin to Bittrex.com

Log into https://bittrex.com/Balance and look for Bitcoin under Account balances. Click on the Plus (+) symbol on the left. A pop up appears with an address and QR code. Copy the wallet addres. It’s usually a 32 character random address.

I could recommend other coins, but nobody is a believer in crypto until gains are made. These coins will definitely give some gains in this current bull market. It is then that they will investigate smaller coins if they wish.

Where I am now

1/11/2017 Moved most alts to BTC in preparation for November Segwit fork –

6/11/2017 BTC has moved up 14%. Now sitting on 3.45 BTC

STRATEGY

Just before November fork BTC will have moved up a few more percentage points – I will move all BTC into an alt or two, get a 20-30% gain right after the fork then change out, wait 30-60 minutes then change to Tether . AT this point it should be 20-50% gain in BTC.

I will then wait for BTC to drop using technical analysis and sentiment and buy back in. There is always the risk of BCH winning so this is why I am just going to tether rather than wait in BTC.

Post fork: 50% BTC to cold wallet, 25% btc and 25% Alts for trading.

I also have 1.4BCH as insurance in case of a random flippening.

For now, I am looking at past charts to see which alts show most potential (Hint: it seems the HYPED coins are the ones to go for)

What I’ve been doing – launching ICO website soon

The past 2 months I’ve been working on trying to launch a website with a friend which lists crypto ICOs and what we think is a good one going to be. The market is tough and finding out ICO prices for various established coins is proving quite time consuming. Revenue is expected to be quite small and only come from advertising. It’s a labour of love.

I’ve mostly parked my funds in BTC and some alts. However my priority is still saving a deposit for a home.

(Australian) strategy to live partially off BTC or pay bills at a discount

The only trustworthy website out there is livingroomofsatoshi.com which allows you to pay BPAY or send money to your bank account from your bitcoin or favourite coin wallet. The strategy is this

When BTC price is low, BUY BTC.

When BTC price is high, transfer BTC to a BPAY bill or your bank account for imminent bill payment.

Repeat.

This literally revolves on a constant source of fiat and recycling of BTC not to be used in alts.

If done right, you can get 5-20% discount on your fiat bills. I will need to do some figures on this but i will use it to pay my credit card bill later this month (market is rising right now in anticipation of the Oct 25 BTG fork)

I have my other portfolio, and I will be using $1000 to start a “buy the hype and sell the news strategy”.

Currently more and more people are pouring into crypto and asking what coins to buy. I will be buying coins based on pure hype and sell and dump on events. Events include

Listing on exchanges. I’ve been watching some live listings on exchanges and the price usually drops right away.. it may rise later but that is not this strategy

Renaming, rebranding. e.g. lisk. Buy during hype and when the announcement is made, sell. Long term of course I would hold but it defeats this particular purpose

ICOs. This one is tricky. e.g. If a big project is being listed that only accepts NEO. I will buy NEO 2 or 3 days beforehand, and a few hours or minutes before launch, I will sell. Because of the time it takes for confirmation. I will probably do the following:

I bought NEO (antshares) at $16, 2 months ago and sunk $1000 into it. I also bought $1000 worth of other speculative coins like Siacoin, ReddCoin, Stratis, Steem. There were the most hyped up. They went up a bit then went down, and down, and down. Neo went a bit higher.

2 months later (today

NEO is worth $3000 (at $50), while the rest plummeted to about $400. So a $2000 investment turned to $3400. Not bad. So I sold all my shares (about $8000) and have moved it to crypto.

I’m aiming for 50% stable and 50% speculative. Right now this is the breakdown

XVG – put in $970 at $0.0035. Now its $0.0026. I am hoping XVG gains traction and hits $3. This will then generate almost $1M
WAVES – Put $200 at $4.56. Now its $5.24. Long term hold.
OMG – Put in $145 at $5.64 ea. Now it’s $8.27. Another long term hold. They have a working product. I may chuck a bit more into OMG.
BNB – Put in $715 at $2.17 ea. Now it’s $1.95. This is a chinese exchange, it shows promise as they are launching ICOs on the platform but recently suffered scaling issues.
PAY – Put in $958.44 at $4.30 ea. Now it’s $3.58. Aka TenX. Bought this on hype. They have a working card however has not reached critical mass.
BQX – Put in $739 at $1.24. Now it’s $0.928. Bought on hype. They aim to make a universal wallet. However lots of others are doing the same. BQX are close to releasing though.
DNT – Put in $382 at $0.15. Now it’s $0.16. aka District0x – Big ambitions and I bought at peak during hype. Another rookie mistake. We will see how this goes. It’s only a few hundred.

Portfolio value 27th August 2018 – $7449 or $1.69 BTC.

As you can see, I will need to funnel more money into stable coins. NEO profits have covered my losses in the speculatives. It is highly likely all speculative coins will end up being ‘bags’. OMG seems most stable. We are going for the Pareto principle where 20% of stock will give 80% of gains.

With all the talk about crypto and the hype, I read as much as I can and I am usually pretty good at avoiding scams such as ponzi schemes or fake ICOs.

I came across a post in the Crypto Coin Traders group in which there was a cross promotion with “Jah Trader” aka Chris Cole promoting his website Crypto Kings. People on BHW were quite skeptical and there were a handful of mixed positive and negative results. I signed up anyway. It was $500 to sign up and get some indicators.

The platform, Ninjatrader, is legit. Chris would hold a room 3 times a week via gotomeeting and we just watch him do trades and he provides the occasional commentary. The emphasis is placing stops.

However the signs were coming.

Lack of communication. Blaming the deaths of family members, the ‘room’ didn’t launch for the newbies until 2 weeks after. However we were given a 2 week grace renewal period.

I paid $500 extra for indicators that I could install on Ninjatrader. Googling and researching – i found the same indicators from futures.io at $100. At the time, ‘Chris’ would advertise that he was “not trying to make money from the indicators”.

He would sometimes cut off the room early without notice

More lack of communication.

Upsell of the auto mated program. This was the crux. We struggled to pass the topsteptrader combine and here he comes with a program that could solve our problems at a few thousand dollars. Programs might work short term but not long.

‘Chris’ didn’t realise I signed up via the Crypto website. He runs two websites to funnel new users in. Crypto kings and Order Flow, but I don’t think he works with Order Flow Analytics anymore. Lack of support

There was little education. Chris was more reactive to our questions rather than proactively teaching us TA fundamentals like resistance and support. However he did know.

Anyway, there was actually NO crypto learning. It was actually learning how to trade ZB stocks (future bonds). I did learn the basics of trading, however I learned way more on youtube videos about indicators such as RSI, MACD, and Ichimoku. The program here was focus on volume trading, which is also a very good strategy. However Chris seemed non committal to us.

How did I go?

I followed most of Chris’ trades and some days I got results, some days I didn’t.

I went on my own and got similar wins and losses. More losses at first and later I got more patient with selecting trades when there was convergence on all indicators.

Overall I could see myself doing the combine but I would be better off saving up for my own bankroll rather than giving 20% of profits to TST and also a monthly fee to Chris. However starting the room got me onto the world of trading – you gotta start somewhere. $1000 Lesson learned.

Since my realisation, I went back to the Crypto Coin Trader group on Facebook, and it is apparent all posts related to Jah Trader were deleted. So the admins seem legit but were also fooled by the scheme.

Control-Finance and why I’m not putting money into it

I *was* in an Australian crypto facebook group and someone posted a link to a website that claimed daily profits. I laughed and got booted. The website is control-finance.com

The website looks SLICK, and professionally made. They have the standard secure SSL buttons at the bottom, and contact details. Looking up the address the company is registered under one person.

The company focuses a lot on two things

Investment offer of guaranteed 1% daily

Affiliate program

Any normal person who is scared of new programs would just put a few dollars, in however the affiliate program encourages people to put MORE money into the program. “Representatives” who put $300 or more get their name published on the website. Classic.

REMEMBER WHY CRYPTOCURRENCY WAS MADE

Cryptocurrency was made to defeat the purpose of the limitations of our current ‘fiat’ system. i.e. inflation and PRINTING of money by the banks. This website is literally funnelling money into its accounts.

Sure, RIGHT NOW they may be paying people, however we are still in early days, and eventually this PONZI scheme will collapse once, however not after millions have been made.

The website right now as of 27th July 2017 the website DOES NOT EVEN HAVE FINANCIAL WARNINGS to tell you that any investment is a risk. A legitimate website would AT LEAST have this. So don’t be surprised if this kind of statement appears soon after I post this.

I just wonder how Benjamin Reynolds plans to take all the money out. It would be interesting to see his/her exit strategy.

But what about the reports?

You’ve given your money to this company who is day trading BTC. BTC goes up and down. How can they pay you if they are DOWN? By relying on more people joining and giving money. If BTC went down and everyone pulled out, the company is dead in the water.

IF YOU ARE STILL GOING TO INVEST AND IGNORE MY ADVICE…

Check the facebook page and find some of the reviews. Reports of money not all appearing, penalties on deposits…

Also, if you still want to put money in. i would suggest getting some profit and GTFO of the program immediately before the ponzi scheme falls over.

Bushrangers and cowboys

At this rate, this side of the crypto world is unregulated. It’s all bushrangers and cowboys scamming greedy people.

CURRENT BTC STATUS

Wallet account has gone from 0.84 to 0.61BTC in a few weeks. I’m not worried, because this was money I could afford to lose. So I will be HODLing for now.

EOS.IO

I missed the ICO people report it is easier to buy EOS on exchanges, so I will probably do that when i get some more cashflow.

TRANSITION TO LEARNING DAY TRADE / READING CHARTS INSTEAD OF BUYING ON HYPE

One of my contacts on facebook predicted the current BTC correction to half using purely technical analysis. I was amazed and looked into courses.

I came across one via one of the Crypto Coins Group from the user under the moniker “Jah Trader”. Pretty much on blind faith I sent over the sign up fee of approx $300USD (its monthly) and have signed up on a TRAINING program to do day trading. It’s more of a course where we watch Jah do his trades and explains some basic TA… then he answers any questions we have .

We are trading on the future bonds market with a ‘paper’ account which allows us to prove we can do profitable trades. Once we can prove this (after 3 months) then we can access a “$50k” account where we can trade. Before that 3 month mark i will have invested just about $1500 in fees. Is it worth it? We are assured IF WE PUT THE WORK IN it will work.

The ultimate goal is to learn how to analyse, read charts so that I can apply these to crypto coins.

I will report back on this in a few months.

Signed up for Hacked.com for a month

I signed up for hacked.com because of their very detailed ICO analysis and community. In some ways it is similar to this website. It seems very useful to grasp on what other strategies the founder is going through to become a millionaire. I recommend signing up for a month, reading all the articles and if you like, stay on.

I have decided not to renew as I have read all the content and dont plan to invest in ICOs soon, so I don’t need the analyses. However I may return to hacked later simply for it’s sound financial advice and community.

I’ve downloaded the SiaCoin miner and started using my GPU to mine SiaCoin. SiaCoin announced they will be releasing an ASIC miner to be released in 2018. This means I got about 6-12 months to make as much SiaCoin via GPU before ASIC’s smash it. General consensus is that this means the value “should” go up. Who knows.. but for now GPU is going for it. It’s going at about 1000 MH/s

This time next year I think at this rate I’ll probably have my own rig!